IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 67, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2018 12273
Toward Traffic Patterns in High-Speed Railwa y
Communication Systems: Power Allocation
and Access Selection
Jiaxun Lu , Ke Xiong , Member, IEEE, Xuhong Chen, and Pingyi Fan , Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—In high-speed railway communication systems, the
distributed antenna systems are usually employed to mitigate
frequent handover and enhance the signal-to-noise ratio to re-
ceivers. In this case, jointly optimizing downlink power alloca-
tion with antenna selection (PAWAS) can enhance system energy
efficiency, while the channel state and traffic density are taken
into account. Besides, two typical kinds of terrains with sparse and
rich scatterings and three traffic patterns including delay-sensitive,
-insensitive, and hybrid traffics are investigated in this paper. We
show that severe small-scale fading decreases the ergodic capacity,
which is quantitatively analyzed, and proved to be proportional
to the number of selected transmit antennas. In addition, in case
of delay-sensitive traffic, we show that the PAWAS can be viewed
as generalized channel-inversion associated with transmit antenna
selection. In case of delay-insensitive traffic, we show that when
multiple antennas are selected, the power allocation can be viewed
as channel-inversion, whereas when single antenna is selected, it
is traditional waterfilling. In case of hybrid traffic, we prove that
the optimal PAWAS method can be given by separately solving
the PAWAS of its delay-sensitive and -insensitive parts. Simulation
results validate our theoretical results and demonstrate that pro-
posed PAWAS can minimize the average transmit power in cases
of arbitrary traffic density and channel states.
Index Terms—Mobility, energy efficiency, queuing theory, traffic
pattern, power allocation, antenna selection.
I. INTRODUCTION
I
N RECENT decades, high-speed railway (HSR) is experi-
encing explosive growth, where distributed antenna systems
(DASs) are usually utilized to mitigate frequent handover and
improve signal to noise ratio (SNR) to receivers [1]–[3]. In the
Manuscript received November 14, 2017; revised June 19, 2018 and August
25, 2018; accepted October 8, 2018. Date of publication October 12, 2018;
date of current version December 14, 2018. This work was supported in part
by the China Major State Basic Research Development Program (973 Program)
under Grant 2012CB316100(2), and in part by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China under Grant 61771283. The review of this paper was
coordinated by Dr. O. Holland. (Corresponding author: Pingyi Fan.)
J. Lu, X. Chen, and P. Fan are with the Department of Electronic Engi-
neering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China (e-mail:, lujx14@mails.
tsinghua.edu.cn; chenxh13@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn; fpy@tsinghua.edu.cn).
K. Xiong is with the Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua Uni-
versity, Beijing 100084, China, and also with the School of Computer and
Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100084, China
(e-mail:,kxiong@bjtu.edu.cn).
This paper has supplementary downloadable material available at
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TVT.2018.2875817
downlink, due to the high mobility of train and large spacing
between adjacent radio antenna units (RAUs), the large-scale
path fading between transmit and receive pairs can be fast time-
varying and widely fluctuant as train running along the railway,
and hence the system energy efficiency may also vary dramat-
ically [4]–[7]. In this case, time-domain dynamic resource al-
location based on channel states, such as power allocation and
antenna selection, can effectively maximize the average energy
efficiency. For instance, waterfilling can be adopted to achieve
the best energy-efficiency in time-varying channels, and adap-
tive antenna selection can be used to find the best antennas to
transmit with.
In the literatures, most existing works on dynamic resource
allocation considered the power allocation and antenna selec-
tion separately [5]–[10]. For instance, Dong et al. introduced
time-domain power allocation to HSR system by considering
the fairness of system [5], and Zhang et al. extended it by mini-
mizing the average transmit power in cases of delay constraints
[6]. Besides, the authors in [7] related the optimal transmit rates
of delay-sensitive and -insensitive traffics to specific total trans-
mit power. The antenna scheme in these papers is single-input-
single-output (SISO). In addition, [8], [9] and [10] provided the
antenna selection strategies of centralized and distributed large-
scale multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) by maximizing
the system energy efficiency. The considered scenario in these
papers is static.
This paper considers the optimal joint time-domain power
allocation with antenna selection (PAWAS) in dynamic HSR
cases, which minimizes the average transmit power. We focus
on the downlink scenario, where multiple mobile relays (MRs)
are mounted on the carriages, forming the two-hop architecture
and multiple-input channel [2], [6]. At the transmit side, it is
allowed to adaptively select the transmit RAUs. When single
RAU is selected, it is a single-input-multiple-output (SIMO)
transmission, whereas when multiple RAUs are selected, it is a
multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) transmission. Besides,
considering the fact that the transmit power at each RAU is con-
strained by their limited module power [11], this paper considers
the transmit scheme where the selected RAUs transmit signals
independently with equal power. Also, note that the problems
on estimating the channel state information (CSI) and mitigat-
ing the interference caused by Doppler spread in HSR systems
have been effectively addressed in the literature [2], [3], [20],
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